When she was dark, they said, she was very, very dark, and when she was light she was lighter than air.
She waved, and waved again. Each time, her face would be dark and apprehensive, then lighten to a smile; each time as she smiled the cat would close its eyes. And each time another petal would drift in rocking lightness to the ground.
"If we watch long enough," I said, "there will be no more petals. The tree will fruit."
"No," said Once a Day. "No, it won't."
There was a puzzle that St. Gene made: he took a strip of paper, and half-twisted it, and sealed it in a loop. Now, he said, trace the outside of the loop with your finger. But don't trace the inside. But the beginning of the inside always came before the end of the outside; the loop always began again before it came to an end.
"That's a riddle," I said. "You promised me, last month, you wouldn't set me riddles any more."
"I don't remember riddles," she said.
Mother Tom waved. The cat slept. The petal fell. With a sudden suffocating sense of having discovered myself to be in a small, closed place forever and ever, I understood: all the petals that fell were one petal. Mother Tom's wave was one wave. Winter never comes.
Fifth Facet
"When do you go?" I asked her.
May had rebuilt our shade house on the hill; the grass we had beaten down there had sprung up golden-green again.
"Soon," she said. "They'll come to tell me."
They had been going away, one by one, down toward the river, and returning, naked many of them, from Dr. Boots, the old looking like children and the young ancient. The letter was got by each, and their secrets grew strong and sure, and intersected me everywhere. I turned to them, one by one, to the friends I had made, and found they had disappeared, though they looked at me still; and the greeting died on my lips. Even the youngest children, though left out as I was, seemed more still, and played games I didn't know with cats who seemed restless and watchful. And though it was the List that had become-become disembodied, in a way, yet it seemed that it was I who was not there, who was only a flicker of memory and misunderstanding amid the solid weight of their magic.
"What if," I said to her, "what if you didn't go, this year?"
"What do you mean?" she said, not as though she truly wanted to know, but as though I had said something without any meaning at all, which hardly interested her. A thick wave of despair came over me. She could never, even Whisper cord as she was, have asked me that question in Little Belaire: what do you mean?
"I mean what I say," I said softly. "I really mean what I say."
She looked at me, the blue of her eyes as blank and opaque as the sky behind us. She looked away, at the hoppers that hopped in the damp grass; at Brom, who chased them, daintily for one so huge. She couldn't hear. I would have to say it all in words.
"I don't want you to go and get this letter," I said.
Through the year I had lived with her, she had come slowly to be someone I knew; not the girl I had once known, but, month by month, someone I knew. I hadn't asked for what wasn't given me; yet she had given me herself. And I knew that when she got her letter she would be abstracted from me again as surely as if she fled from here to Little Moon. "Listen to me now," I said, and took her thin wrist. "We could go away. You said they wouldn't care, and surely now of any time they would care least. We could go tonight."
"Go where?" She smiled at me as though I were telling some fantastic tale, one of their jokes.
"We could go back to Little Belaire." I meant: to Belaire, where we were born, Belaire and the saints and the Filing System and the gossips who untie knots instead of tying them tighter as the old ones here do, Belaire where every story has a proof and all the secrets have names at least; I meant We could go home.
"It wasn't my home," she said, and my heart leaped, for I heard she had heard me. "It wasn't my home, only a place I found myself in."
"But, then, anywhere, anywhere you like, only..
"Don't," she said gently, looking at the grass, at the glitter of the hoppers. She meant: don't darken me now, not now of any time.
Far off, we saw someone coming toward us, in a sleeveless black coat and a wide hat. Houd. He stopped some way off and watched us for a moment. Then he raised the stick he walked with, summoning her, and turned and walked away.
"I'm to go now," she said, and rose.
"Do you know I lose you by it?" I said, but she didn't answer, only started after Houd toward Service City.
I put my head on my knees and looked at the grass between my feet. Each blade of grass, tiny bud, tinier bug, was clear, clearer than I had ever seen them before. I wondered at that.
No! I leaped up, and Brom stopped playing to watch me. I caught up with her as she started across the wide, sun-heated stone plaza. Winter had cracked it, adding minute wrinkles to its face as years add them to a human face.
"Once a Day," I said to her back, "I'm going away. I don't know where, but I'm going. In a year, I'll come back. But promise me: promise you'll think about me. Think about me, always. Think about… think about Belaire, and the foxes, about the Money, think about how I came and found you, think about…"
"I don't remember foxes," she said, not turning to me.
"I'll come back and ask you again. Will you think about me?"
"How can I think about you if you're not here?"
I grasped her shoulder, suddenly furious. "You can! Stop it! Speak to me, speak to me, I can't bear it if you don't… All right, all right," for she was closing her face against me, turning away, taking my hand from her as though it were some accidental obstruction, a dead branch, an old coat, "only listen: no matter what you say, I know you can hear me: I'll go away now, and we can both think, and I'll come back. In the spring."
"This is spring," she said, and walked away across the plaza. I watched her, vivid, white, and living for a moment against the immense absent blackness of way-wall; and then gone. Blink: gone. As though she hadn't been.
And what if, I thought, my heart a cold stone, what if she had spoken truthfully to me, what if she had heard in all I said that I could no more go away from here for a year - for a month, for a day - than Brom could speak or St. Blink tell a lie?
I don't remember the rest of that day, what I did with myself. Perhaps I stayed where I had been left, on that stone. But at evening, before I could see her return, I went to Twenty-eight Flavors to find Thinsinura.
She stood with other old ones at the long counter, pondering with them a great piece of smooth slate which had been carefully coated with beeswax, so that signs could be made on it. After some thought, she brought forward one woman and gave her a pointed stick; as the others smiled and nodded, she bent and made a sign on the wax. Zhinsinura hugged her then, and she departed with one or two others.
"I want to go too," I said, and Zhinsinura turned her hooded eyes on me. "I've passed all your tests. I haven't asked for what wasn't given me: but I ask now for that."
She held up her hand for the others to wait, and took me by the shoulder to the time table, where we could talk alone. "No tests were set you," she said. "But I will ask you this: why did you come here?"
There were a lot of answers to that, though only one that mattered now. "There was a story," I said, "about four dead men. A wise man I knew told me that you here might know the ending to it. I suppose he was wrong. It doesn't matter now."